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Christmas app store haul.

One of my favourite things about this time of year is the annual App Store freeze, where chart rankings and prices are suspended over the holidays. Developers rush to discount their products and get them as high on the charts as possible and we get to reap the rewards for that.

This year, I reaped a lot of rewards for it and hey, even if I had to pay for those rewards, at least I paid a lot less than usual for them.

This was a last minute buy. I’d actually never even heard of the game but I came across it on one of those “Best games of 2014” posts running across all game sites and it was so convincingly promoted that I figured a few dollars wasn’t too much of a risk on it.

Ok, so this one wasn’t technically discounted but was still a purchase I made during this period thanks to the heady rush of online retail therapy. I loved the original (despite its lack of decks and having so many of them as IAP when other clones had scores more for free) so of course I had to give this one a go.

I got the original ages back and found it an overrated, insanely repetitive game that was basically just a hardware demo for whatever the latest iPhone model was at that time. Since then, though, I’ve heard that the ante has been upped and at this price it isn’t too much of a loss even if it turns out to still be just a glorified spec sheet.

This was one of those highly rated games that I had been aching to try my hands at, even if just for that glorious artwork, but didn’t because plonking S$6 (slightly pricier for the app store) on a type of gameplay I’m not usually a fan of didn’t sound very…sound. At half off though, it seems worth the try.

I have to say, I didn’t really know much about the game and had written it off as a B-grade filler based purely on what I saw of it in the App Store. As with Banner Saga, though, it was so glowingly talked about on another best-of post that S$1.28 seemed a small price to pay.

Oceanhorn has been described as Zelda for iOS and, while I’m one of those weirdos who has never been able to get that series, this one did seem pretty cool (because I’m totally judging a game by its screenshots) and far cheaper than a usual Zelda game so why not?

Oh, and I wanted to get Terraria (which was discount at S$1.28 too) but it’s free in the Amazon App Store great year-end giveaway so I’m going to play that there instead and see what all the fuss is about.